The best books on Pacific wayfinding

This book was also published under the title Vikings of the Pacific and was written by New Zealand Māori scholar Sir Peter Buck (also known by his Māori name, Te Rangi Hīroa). It was a pioneering work explaining, from an Indigenous perspective, the process through which the islands of Polynesia came to be settled over thousands of years by voyagers traveling in outrigger or double-hulled canoes without navigational instruments.

As an anthropologist whose research has focused on Polynesia and who has always been interested in maritime issues, I was intrigued by the questions this book raised and motivated to explore them during my own ethnographic fieldwork.

This book is Thor Heyerdahl’s account of a 4,000-mile voyage, in 1947, on a balsa-wood raft from Peru to French Polynesia. Heyerdahl hypothesized that Polynesia was originally settled from the Americas. When supposed experts responded that Indigenous people lacked the technology to make such a voyage, he set out to prove them wrong. Evidence now makes it clear that Oceania was populated from Asia rather than lands to the east. Nonetheless, Heyerdahl demonstrated that humans can safely traverse the open sea using small craft built from natural materials.

Heyerdahl’s book sold millions of copies, was translated into dozens of languages, and led to an award-winning film. It stimulated interest in indigenous seafaring and inspired generations of researchers to sail with mariners from small, remote island communities and to document their exploits. I count myself among those so inspired.

This book was the first systematic, book-length effort to explain how Pacific voyagers found their way across thousands of miles of open sea without such navigational instruments as a sextant or magnetic compass.

The author, Thomas Gladwin, conducted research on Puluwat Atoll (now usually written as “Polowat”) in what is currently the Federated States of Micronesia. By working with skilled navigators, he documented the complex understanding of astronomic phenomena, wind patterns, currents, and waves that Micronesian wayfinders used to travel to small islands across immense expanses of open sea.

This work inspired me to ask respected sailors on the islands where I conducted research about the techniques on which they rely.

In this book, David Lewis—a physician, anthropologist, and world sailor—traveled around the Pacific, consulting with respected navigators from many islands about their understandings and the natural cues on which they relied for inter-island voyaging. Lewis reinforced many of Gladwin’s points and also made me acutely aware of regional variation.

Along the way, he commented that canoes in the “Polynesian Outliers” (islands inhabited by Polynesian people but located in territory commonly identified as “Melanesia” or “Micronesia”) are built with an interchangeable bow and stern. That was not true on Anuta, the Polynesian Outlier on which I had conducted my doctoral research, and I thought the discrepancy was worth a brief comment in a professional journal. I began writing, and by the time I was done, I had a first draft of my book on Anutan seafaring.

Ben Finney was a surfer, sailor, and anthropologist who spent his career at the University of Hawai‘i and was a founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS). The PVS built Hōkūle‘a, a double-hulled sailing canoe modeled on a traditional Hawaiian design but constructed of modern materials.

Finney, then, was part of a team that sailed from Hawai‘i to Tahiti in 1976 without instruments under the leadership of Pius “Mau” Piailug, a renowned navigator from the Micronesian island of Satawal. This book is Finney’s account of that journey and its many challenges.

Hōkūle‘a and the PVS’s experience helped inspire me to write my volume on Anutan seamanship, and Finney wrote the foreword. Later, in 2007, he joined me in a study of Taumako voyaging.